Adobe Creative Cloud Drives G-Men Productivity

Media production company G-Men Media (Venice, Calif.), launched in early 2012, is focused primarily on feature film and commercial broadcast content. We use the latest digital technologies to reduce costs and accelerate workflow for our clientele. In addition to post facilities, we offer full production capabilities and development services.

Our goal in founding G-Men was to use the latest and greatest technologies to reduce production costs for our clients. Initially we set up an internal shared storage network in our office, which allowed editing teams to work simultaneously on media projects to reduce turnaround time for productions.

Finally Getting to the Cloud

That satisfied our immediate collaborative needs, but we had always envisioned a cloud-based editing solution that would allow us to scale up or down on any production without having to invest in additional infrastructure. We found that Adobe Anywhere for video allows us to do just that. It lets us and our clients use the same familiar software that we’ve licensed—Adobe Creative Cloud—and harness the rendering power of our internal server.

Divine Access is a comedic religious satire written and directed by Steven Chester Prince and co-produced by G-Men Media and Traveling Picture Show Co.

One of the more notable benefits of the system is that it lets us work anywhere there’s a decent Internet connection. The days of being chained to edit bays and transferring hardware to new production sites are now over. We can use our server power to let us work from basic computers anywhere, making our post workflow solution extremely convenient and collaborative.

After we deployed Adobe Anywhere, we used it extensively on projects with plenty of turnaround time. We tested it by running four commercial spec projects and a feature film that had an extraordinary amount of mixed media captured during a three-year period. Adobe Anywhere handled it all. With this reassurance we began using it with all of our clients and projects.

Adobe Anywhere has been working fantastically for us for almost a year now. On most projects we work entirely online. Remote assets are easily ingested via Adobe Premiere Pro CC or Adobe Prelude CC and can be worked on immediately while the files transfer.

No Waiting Around Here

We recently co-produced a feature film (Divine Access) starring Gary Cole and Billy Burke, with the location shooting taking place in Austin, Texas. It’s now in postproduction at G-Men.

During the location shooting, each day we’d have the footage delivered to an Austin office that had decent upload speed. That footage would then hit our server and be stored on the Adobe Anywhere production, usually within an hour. Once this was done, our editorial staff had full access to the footage. Our producers really appreciated the fact that they could use the Adobe Anywhere iPad app to quickly check dailies or takes. All of the data remained secure through a VPN, and the management of user access to data was easily handled by our postproduction supervisor.

Adobe Anywhere really saved us a lot of time and money in connection with this production and made the process very efficient. It’s a good example of how we now handle all of our productions. VE

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